Tag Archives | landscape

“We’re probably going to surf Banna Strand, but the swell might still be a bit small, I just can’t decide.” Dylan slumps back into the passenger seat of my car and throws his phone momentarily from his hands. He has spent most of the journey with it held to his nose, furrowing his brow as he examines various surf forecasts from across the southwest coast of Ireland. Dylan is one of those people for whom finding good waves has become an obsession, and missing them an unthinkable tragedy. It is a cold October morning, and the swell from Hurricane Joaquin is forecast to make landfall along Ireland’s Atlantic coast around lunchtime.…

This is the fifth book by Macfarlane about British landscapes. The ‘landmarks’ of the title are not what one might expect: they are words. The book is about the power of words in place making. This reminds us that landscapes may be material topographic realities but they are simultaneously constituted in the mind. Traditionally, in academic debates, landscapes have been regarded as either reductively shaping the manner in which people think or blank slates on which people inscribe the way in which they think in more or less any way they like. In this respect their material topographies become mere backdrops to an understanding of the manner in which they are understood.…

Two doctoral research fellowships (SKO 1017) within the three strategic research areas of the Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo: Heritage, Innovation, and Troubled Landscapes

The Museum of Cultural History has the largest archaeological and ethnographic collections in Norway, with antiquities dating from prehistoric times to the Reformation, and ethnographic and numismatic antique and contemporary artefacts from all parts of the world. The collections of the museum include the Viking ships, medieval church art, the coin cabinet, an Egyptian collection and an antiquity collection. In addition, the Museum of Cultural History has an archive of runes and a conservation laboratory with workshops, including one that is set up for the development of digital methods of documentation and public outreach.

by P. LAVIOLETTE, Anthropology Dept, EHI, Tallinn University

Finally a book that could speak to me. And yet, with the unpredictability of conversational direction that the editors remind us of in their introduction, what would I hear? How to respond? Such ideas were made even more daunting when flipping through the table of contents to realise that we are dealing with a cacophony of no less than eighteen different authorial voices, not to mention those of informants, reference citations and of course the unique narrative style of the volume itself.

Why get drawn into this particular conversation then? There’s indeed a plethora of books on landscape out there.…

In 1969, architect Amos Rapoport published his book House, Form and Culture. He was inspired in his work by his own observations as well as his meetings with anthropologists. The book focused more on vernacular architecture than on the modern or contemporary one. Since then, the anthropology of architecture, and the most recent forms of architecture in particular, remained in a foetal state. In France, the recurrent appear of Marion Ségaud’s name cannot but testify that she is lonely. Sociology has been a bit more eloquent, sometimes having the perverse effect of heaping opprobrium on an entire profession and its productions: the criticism of “grands ensembles”, where architects have often taken the role of scapegoats, almost disqualified the modern movement.…